Interactive Map of World’s Languages
from Atlas of the World’s Languages
This visualization explores the distribution of world’s languages based on the Asher & Moseley (2007) Atlas of the World’s Languages. This visualization builds on the recent work of Ranacher et al. (2025), who created a global and interoperable dataset of linguistic distributions derived from the Atlas of the World’s Languages. Each polygon represents a geographic area where a specific language is spoken. Two maps are shown for each language: one for the traditional speaker areas and one for the contemporary speaker areas.
Important! The resolution of the map is reduced to 5% of the original data via ms_simplify function to reduce the size of the rendered HTML page. If you need higher resolution, you can remove the ms_simplify line in the prepare_geojson_data function and render the qmd file locally.
Main Interactive Maps
Major Language Families
Below are interactive maps for major language families in the traditional and contemporary data. Each family shows traditional (left) and contemporary (right) maps side-by-side. Hover over any polygon to see detailed language information.
Atlantic-Congo
Traditional Speaker Areas
Contemporary Speaker Areas
Austronesian
Traditional Speaker Areas
Contemporary Speaker Areas
Sino-Tibetan
Traditional Speaker Areas
Contemporary Speaker Areas
Nuclear Trans New Guinea
Traditional Speaker Areas
Contemporary Speaker Areas
Afro-Asiatic
Traditional Speaker Areas
Contemporary Speaker Areas
Indo-European
Traditional Speaker Areas
Contemporary Speaker Areas
Austroasiatic
Traditional Speaker Areas
Contemporary Speaker Areas
Uralic
Traditional Speaker Areas
Contemporary Speaker Areas
Language Family Statistics
This section shows the distribution of languages across major language families in both traditional and contemporary databases.
Traditional Database
Contemporary Database
Complete Language Database
Traditional Database
Contemporary Database
Technical Implementation
This visualization uses: - SF: For spatial data handling - Leaflet: For interactive mapping - Plotly: For interactive visualizations - DT: For interactive data tables - Quarto: For modern scientific publishing
The application is designed for an initial check of the language maps from the Atlas of the World’s Languages. It is deployable on GitHub Pages using Quarto. The script is in the language-map.qmd file (partly generated by Cursor). The reformated geojson data are contemporary_sf.rds and traditional_sf.rds.
Data Sources:
Asher, R.E. & Moseley, C. (2007). Atlas of the World’s Languages. Routledge.
Ranacher, P., Forkel, R., Efrat-Kowalsky, N. et al. (2025). A global and interoperable dataset of linguistic distributions derived from the Atlas of the World’s Languages. Scientific Data 12, 1466. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41597-025-05828-6